It's quick and easy to start your virtual machine in the cloud if you use vagrant. Like, 55 seconds fast. I find it especially handy for toy projects that I need on the web quickly or when I don't want another virtual machine to gobble up resources on my laptop. I'm going through the steps for DigitalOcean. It's similarly easy for Amazon Web Services (AWS), but I find their web interface somewhat discombobulated. A word on pricing : if you use the cloud for a small project it's basically free. A full day on Digital Oceans costs 16 cents. That's (hopefully) less than you tip on a cup of coffee. There are a lot of online coupons that'll get you through the first few months. AWS offers a full year for free, see http://aws.amazon.com/free/ . I'm assuming that you have vagrant installed and a Vagrantfile already written or generated with vagrant init . Ok, let's get started! First, download the vagrant plugin. vagrant plugin install vagrant-digital...